A senior North Korean official has accused the US of turning
the Korean peninsula into “the world’s biggest hotspot” and creating “a
dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment”.

North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador, Kim In-ryong, described
US-South Korean military exercises as the largest ever “aggressive war drill”
and said his country was “ready to react to any mode of war desired by the US”.

The country’s deputy foreign minister, Han Song-Ryol, told
the BBC that Pyongyang would continue to test missiles “on a weekly, monthly
and yearly basis”. All-out war would ensue if the US took military action, he
said..

The statements from the North Korean officials came as the
US president, Donald Trump, told the government in Pyongyang that it has “gotta
behave” and his vice-president, Mike Pence, said the “era of strategic patience
is over”.

Pence’s visit to the tense demilitarised zone dividing North
and South Korea came at the start of a 10-day trip to Asia and underscored US
commitment to the region.

As the vice-president was briefed near the demarcation line,
two North Korean soldiers watched from a short distance away, one taking
photographs of the American visitor.

Pence told reporters Trump was hopeful China would use its
“extraordinary levers” to pressure Pyongyang to abandon its weapons programme.
But the vice-president expressed impatience with the unwillingness of North
Korea to rid itself of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Pointing to the quarter-century since the US first
confronted North Korea over its attempts to build nuclear weapons, he said a
period of patience had followed.

“But the era of strategic patience is over,” Pence said.
“President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and
our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change. We want to see
North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons –
and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable.”

Trump appeared to reinforce the message at the White House,
replying “gotta behave” when a CNN reporter asked what message he had for the
North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told
reporters on Monday that he hoped there would be “no unilateral actions like
those we saw recently in Syria and that the US will follow the line that
President Trump repeatedly voiced during the election campaign”.

Meanwhile, China made a plea for a return to negotiations.
The foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said tensions need to be eased on the
Korean peninsula to bring the escalating dispute there to a peaceful
resolution. Lu said Beijing wanted to resume the multi-party negotiations that
ended in stalemate in 2009 and suggested that US plans to deploy a missile
defence system in South Korea were damaging its relations with China.

Late on Monday, Pence reiterated in a joint statement
alongside South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, that “all options are
on the table” and said any use of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang would be met
with “an overwhelming and effective response”. He said the American commitment
to South Korea was “iron-clad and immutable”.

Noting Trump’s recent military actions in Syria and
Afghanistan, Pence said North Korea “would do well not to test his resolve” or
the resolve of US armed forces in the region.

The vice-president earlier visited Camp Bonifas, a military
installation near the DMZ, for a briefing with military leaders. Pence stood a
few metres from the military demarcation line outside Freedom House, gazing at
the North Korean soldiers across the border, and then peered at a deforested
stretch of North Korea from a lookout post in the hillside.

In Tokyo, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said:
“Needless to say, diplomatic effort is important to maintain peace. But
dialogue for the sake of having dialogue is meaningless.”

Urging China and Russia to play more constructive roles, he
added: “We need to apply pressure on North Korea so they seriously respond to a
dialogue [with the international community].”

Pence’s visit came amid increasing tensions and heated
rhetoric on the Korean peninsula. The spectre of a potential nuclear test and
an escalated US response has trailed Pence on his Asian tour. The Trump
administration is hoping that China will help rein in North Korea in exchange
for other considerations.

Last week, Trump said he would not declare China a currency
manipulator – pulling back from a campaign promise – as he looked for help from
Beijing, North Korea’s dominant trade partner.

Nuclear war has become thinkable
again – we need a reminder of what it means

Paul Mason

As Trump faces down North Korea, it’s
alarming to think that most of the world’s nuclear warheads are now in the
hands of men who are prepared to use them

‘This sudden mania for speaking of nuclear
warfare, among men with untrammeled power, should be the No 1 item on the
news.’

Last week, Donald Trump deployed his superweapon Moab, the
“mother of all bombs” – 10 tonnes of high explosive detonated in mid-air in
such a way as to kill, it is claimed, 94 Isis militants. The Russian media
immediately reminded us that their own thermobaric bomb – the “father of all
bombs” – was four times as powerful: “Kids, meet Daddy,” was how the Kremlin
mouthpiece Russia Today put it. But these are child’s play compared with
nuclear weapons. The generation waking up to today’s Daily Mail strapline –
“World holds its breath” – may need reminding what a nuclear weapon does.

The one dropped on Hiroshima measured 15 kilotons; it
destroyed everything within 200 yards and burned everybody within 2km. The
warhead carried by a Trident missile delivers a reported 455 kilotons of
explosive power. Drop one on Bristol and the fireball is 1km wide; third-degree
burns affect everybody from Portishead to Keynesham, and everything in a line
from the Bristol Channel to the Wash is contaminated with radiation. In this
scenario, 169,000 people die immediately and 180,000 need emergency treatment.
Given that there are only 101,000 beds in the entire English NHS, you can begin
to imagine the apocalyptic scenes for those who survive. (You can model your
own scenario here.)

But a Trident missile carries up to eight of these warheads,
and military planners might drop them in a pattern around one target, creating
a firestorm along the lines that conventional Allied bombing created in Hamburg
and Tokyo during the second world war.

I don’t wish to alarm you, but right now the majority of the
world’s nuclear warheads are in the hands of men for whom the idea of using
them is becoming thinkable.

For Kim Jong-un, it’s thinkable; for Vladimir Putin, it’s so
thinkable that every major Russian wargame ends with a “nuclear de-escalation”
phase: that is, drop one and offer peace. On 22 December last year, Trump and
Putin announced, almost simultaneously, that they were going to expand their
nuclear arsenals and update the technology.

Right now, a US aircraft carrier strike force is steaming
towards North Korea (the DPRK) to menace Kim’s rogue regime. We don’t know what
secret diplomacy went on between Xi Jinping and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, but the US
is sounding confident that China will rein the North Koreans in.

What we do know is that Trump has been obsessed since the
80s with nuclear weapons, that he refuses to take advice from military professionals
and that he seems not to understand the core Nato concept of nukes as a
political deterrent, as opposed to a military superweapon.

This sudden mania for speaking of nuclear warfare, among men
with untrammeled power, should be the No 1 item on the news, and the No 1
concern of democratic and peace-loving politicians.

The video fireworks on US cable news channels have
progressed in the space of 10 days from cruise missile launches to
bunker-busting airburst porn. One US news host referred to the former as
“beautiful”.

I will always remember the Botoxed faces of the US news
anchors when they arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It was as if
they had been woken up from a dream, and the best of them realised how they had
been sleepwalking towards the disaster.

Katrina shows what happens when a disaster hits a fragile,
poverty-stricken and socially fragmented city. In New Orleans, for a few days,
civilisation fell apart. Policemen, suddenly called on to haul their overweight
frames into self-sacrificing and arduous work, quit on the spot. The modern
equivalent of lynchings happened. Central government and unified military
command of the situation broke down. My experience there convinced me that, in
the event of mass fatalities being inflicted on a developed world city, the
real problem would be social chaos, not mass radiation sickness.

Trump is ramping up the military rhetoric for a horribly
simple reason: two weeks ago, the isolationist wing of his team got outflanked
by generals; they tried some war to see how it went down and it went down well.

We may get lucky. It may be that the Chinese leadership is
prepared to put serious pressure on North Korea to prevent Kim’s regime staging
some kind of provocation against the US navy. Or we may get unlucky: the DPRK has
a nuclear weapon, even if the missiles needed to deliver it are unstable.

It has been human nature, given the scale of devastation a
nuclear war would bring, to blank the possibility from our minds, to worry
about small risks because the big one is incalculable. But from the 50s to the
00s, we had – in all nuclear powers – military/industrial complex politicians
who understood the value of multilateralism. All around us high politics is
becoming emotion driven, unilateral, crowd-pleasing and falling under the
control of erratic family groups and mafias, rather than technocrats
representing ruling elites.

For the warmongers, true multilateralism is a serious
annoyance; that’s why so many of the world’s autocrats are busy forcing NGOs to
register, cutting off foreign funds to them and decrying the presence of
international observers or sabotaging their work.

If Theresa May wanted to send a useful message at Easter it
could have been: in compliance with the non-proliferation treaties, we will
never use our nuclear weapons first; we will stick to diplomatic and economic
pressure to get the DPRK to comply; and we will use our own, independent
diplomatic clout to strengthen disarmament and non-proliferation.

That is what a responsible nuclear-armed power would do. The
UK’s silence as Trump toys with military escalation and nuclear rearmament is
criminal.